More and more people out there are understanding the importance of inbound links. Inbound links are links appearing on other websites which point to your site. The search engines view these inbound links as a sort of popularity contest. The more inbound links you have, the more popularity votes you get, and thus the better your site, at least in the eyes of the search engines. This is known as link popularity and the greater your link popularity, the higher your ranking in search engines. There are, however, some rules when it comes to inbound links.
- Relevancy. The relevancy of your incoming links are very important. Links must come from sites which are relevant to your own. This means that any incoming links on your plastic surgery website must have something to do with plastic surgery. Links from sites with no relevancy to your own can actually hurt you.
- Direction. The ideal link is an inbound one in which you’re not required to link back to that site in return. This, however, can be hard to come by. Many inbound links are acquired through link exchange, in which a site links to yours and you link to theirs.
- Construction. The construction of a link can be very important. Text links are, by far, more valuable than image or banner links. The ideal link is a text link which incorporates your keywords or keyword phrases.
- Sender Status. The status of the site sending you the incoming link is important as well. A link from a more important site will be far more valuable than one from, say, someone’s small, personal web page. PageRank (PR) is Google’s way of ranking pages. A link from a page with a high PR is much better than a link from a page with a low PR, and you should altogether avoid linking with pages having a PR of zero. Of course, acquiring an incoming link from a site with a high PR can be very difficult and often must be bought.Links from reputable news-related or mediate websites are often considered to be the most valuable as search engines tend to assume that these sites are impartial, that they cannot be manipulated, and that the links cannot be bought.